Within days of the release of Rihanna’s new makeup line, Fenty Beauty, countless retailers sold out of the darkest shades available. With over 90 products released in 17 countries at 1,600 stores, including 40 shades for just about every skin tone and a single gloss designed to work for all, Fenty Beauty (in partnership with beauty developer Kendo) quickly established itself as one of the few beauty brands not geared toward an exclusive audience.

Speaking to Refinery29 at the launch, Rihanna said, “I wanted things that I love. Then I also wanted things that girls of all skin tones could fall in love with. That was really important for me. In every product I was like: ‘There needs to be something for a dark-skinned girl; there needs to be something for a really pale girl; there needs to be something in-between.’ There’s red undertones, green undertones, blue undertones, pink undertones, yellow undertones — you never know, so you want people to appreciate the product and not feel like: ‘Oh, that’s cute, but it only looks good on her.’”

While celebrities often say all the right things when it comes to their endorsements and involvement in commercial products, what’s so impressive about Rihanna and Fenty Beauty is that the talk has led to action. The marketing campaign for the beauty line prominently features women of colour, including Duckie Thot, Paloma Elsesser, Halima Aden and Nneoma Anosike.

In a moment of refreshing harmony, a week before the line was released, Insecure writer and actress Issa Rae was announced as the new face of Covergirl, making her one of the brand’s few dark-skinned models. In an Instagram post announcing the sponsorship, she wrote, “I remember being an awkward black girl in high school, reading the pages of my favourite magazines, casually flipping through @COVERGIRL ads, singing their slogan in my head. Never EVER in my life did I imagine I’d be one.”

It’s a poignant statement, because up until this confluence of racially diverse campaigns, women of colour have been largely left out as key spokeswomen of beauty products and, therefore, what has come to be considered beautiful. It’s unlikely epiphany-prompting to suggest that we have traditionally defined beauty by the physical standards promoted by magazine covers, movies, television and even Barbie dolls. But it might be insightful to consider the dominant traits of those we’ve considered beautiful.

We’ve gone from model Twiggy defining the ’60s, to Lauren Hutton in the ’70s, to Elle Macpherson in the ’80s, to Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington as the epicentre of the ’90s, to Gisele Bundchen in the ’00s, and now we’ve got Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner crowning the present. Aside from the iconic faces of Iman, Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks and Alek Wek, for the most part, every inch of what we see in female beauty has been white.

If the evidence is found in the glossy pages of fashion magazines, the implementation of these beauty standards have long been manifested onscreen in movies and television. In a recent Vox story, reporter Estelle Caswell spelled it out simply when she wrote, “Colour film was built for white people.”

Caswell was referring to early colour film, when the chemicals coating the film couldn’t accurately capture skin tones other than white because photo labs hadn’t bothered to consider why photographing a person of any other skin colour would be necessary. This way of thinking is perhaps best exemplified by something called the “Shirley cards.”

In the 1960s, a Kodak employee named Shirley (who might have been considered the “Becky” of the early days) posed for a set of colour reference cards, which became the standard for film and photography productions looking to set a colour for calibrating lighting and shadows. As a result, Shirley’s skin colour became the default skin colour.

An array of the many Fenty Beauty shades.Bryan Bedder/Getty Images

In 1977, Jean Luc Godard famously refused to use Kodak film while shooting in Mozambique because he felt it was a “racist” product. He explained that the film itself trained photographers to use lighter skin tones because setting a scene with darker tones often led to technological obstacles, like exposure issues or a lack of detail in facial features.

Sadly, it wasn’t black or brown actors who paved the way to a new standard. It took wooden furniture and chocolate for a spectrum of skin tone to be introduced in film. By the 1970s, furniture retailers and chocolate makers felt Kodak wasn’t accurately capturing the nuance in the colour of their products, making it difficult for customers to differentiate oak from mahogany, or milk chocolate from dark chocolate.

It wasn’t until 1995 that Kodak introduced a multi-racial skin colour reference card that included a white woman, an Asian woman and an African woman. Of course, it takes more than just a colour reference card to understand how to light different people. That’s why, even today, you’ll still see a movie or a TV show in which the actors of colour are not lit quite as well as their white co-stars.

In 2017, properly lighting shots for a variety of skin tones remains a challenge because the standards of the previous generation are passed down to the next without consideration. When photographers learn how to light a shot, they are typically learning how to light a shot for people with light skin, regardless of what their subjects actually look like. It’s another reason — and should go without saying — why casts and crews that feature more diversity, like those in Insecure, Fresh Off the Boat and Black-ish, are so important. Yes, there is the benefit of increased representation, but a little known part of that is what goes on behind the scenes in developing new technical standards projecting the world we live in.

A technological bias is unlikely to ever fix itself; it takes the artists, technicians and chemists to think forward. Beauty is a spectrum; it used to be defined by what we saw on TV and spilled over into what we saw on store shelves. Now, that might be working in reverse.

Rihanna referred to her makeup line as representing “the new generation of beauty.” While Fenty Beauty isn’t the first to offer a wide range of shades, it is the first to receive the spotlight such inclusivity deserves, because the rest of the world is finally listening, following suit and validating a diverse market.

Just as giving diversity a chance is about more than identity politics, so too is offering something as simple as more makeup shades. The beauty world is acknowledging what has traditionally been lacking, giving it legitimacy and recognition, but Fenty Beauty is also taking that opportunity to speak to a wider demographic than any line before it.

While a tube of lipstick might seem frivolous to one person, it’s anything but to an entire generation of women growing up right now.

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